Miklos Vecsei, deputy head of the Hungarian Maltese Charity Service, said the law had not been passed on the basis of any rational or professional criteria but because the public were fed up with the homeless.

Since people who cannot afford a home would likely be unable to pay a fine, one would assume that the state will have to incarcerate homeless people caught breaking the law. Link -via Arbroath

@Melissa how naive are you? The Hungarian state have no intention to care for these people, they just want them off the street. The ultimate aim of this law is to have these people leave the country. If the state had any intention to care for the homeless they could do so without passing this idiotic law.

This law is almost certainly in contravention of the ECHR and as such the EU will hopefully be taking action against the Hungarian government.

By all means make it illegal if you have access to housing yet refuse to live in it, but if you have no house what choice do you have? Surely putting people in prison is far more expensive than providing them with basic housing. Perhaps the point of the law is not to persuade homeless people to change, but instead to give the police a legal basis on which to harrass them.